Forever Neverland

by Forever Neverland (epub)

  Hook had no time to respond to the fairy’s untimely interruption, for Pan was there, his sword arm raised, his blade descending with deadly speed and efficiency.

  Hook spun and unsheathed his own weapon, once more meeting the young man in hand to hand combat.

  “Wendy!”

  Wendy turned to see Michael and John climbing out of a crevice in the rock fifty feet away. She glanced at Hook and Pan, both engrossed in a battle more fierce than any they had ever had. There would be no hope in stopping them.

  Instead, she raced to her brothers, helping them up and over the lip of the sharp, craggy stone.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Michael. He nodded hurriedly and then grasped hold of her arm.

  “Wendy! You can stop this! You can stop all of this!”

  “What?” Wendy glanced at Hook and Peter. Her heart was beating so hard and so fast, it was painful in her chest. Could a seventeen-year-old have a heart attack?

  “He thinks you can get us out of here with a story!” John told her as he bent to peer through the crevice.

  “Is anyone coming after you?” Wendy asked, her first concern the other pirates, natives, and fairies.

  “No! They’re all fighting down below!” John said. He rose again and turned to face his sister. “Tink untied us so we could come help you.”

  “Wendy!” Michael insisted, yanking on her arm so that she would pay attention to him. Wendy turned to face her little brother. “Remember the story you read about Tootles and the storm?” he asked.

  She nodded, her brow furrowed.

  “The storm came right after you read that!”

  Wendy’s first impulse was to shrug. So what? But something at the edge of his reasoning, and the truth it hinted at, brought her up short. She blinked.

  “And down on the gun deck, I pulled out the paper of story you wrote for me a long time ago and I read a line of it out loud!” Michael continued, raising his voice to be heard over the once more encroaching wind and thunder. Lightning slid into the ocean not far from Skull Rock, bringing a sizzling electric buzz to the air that caused Wendy’s fear to ratchet up a few notches.

  Michael went on. “I read the part about the Jolly Roger floating over Neverland at night! Remember?”

  She remembered. It was her favorite part of any story she’d ever written about Neverland. Because it was James Hook on the deck of his ship, the stars piercingly bright above and around him, the sea dark and calm below. And because, in the story, he was there on the deck with Wendy. Because he was in love with her.

  Wendy closed her eyes, finally shedding the tears that had gathered there. “I remember,” she said.

  “And then we found Neverland!” Michael hollered. “The pirate in the crow’s nest shouted down that we were above land,” he insisted, giving her arm a shake as if it could help her recall, “and Hook said it was Neverland!”

  Wendy didn’t need his help remembering that moment. She’d been sparring with James – with Hook, she mentally corrected herself – and finding that her thoughts kept drifting toward. . . things. And then Smee had raced up to inform Hook that Neverland had been spotted below.

  “It doesn’t mean anything!” Wendy shook her head. “It’s coincidence!”

  “You don’t believe that!” Michael shot back. “You know it’s true! If you want more proof, then try it! Tell a story!”

  She blinked, her eyes wide. “What? Now?”

  “Yes! Right now!”

  Lightning slammed into the opposite side of Skull Rock, sending shards of black stone sailing through the air. One came dangerously close to hitting Wendy and she found that her chest felt too tight, her throat too constricted.

  “Wendy, get us out of here!”

  Wendy thought about what Michael said. She turned and watched the figures of her story, locked in eternal battle. She thought about Hook and his hand and the role he was forced to play in this world. She pictured him as he once was, in that place where he used to live, free from the whims of a boy and his fantasy realm.

  And she thought of Peter – and the role he was forced to play. As Neverland’s protagonist, forever keeping up the good side of the fight, leading a band of little boys against full-grown pirates.

  When he had been no more than a little boy, himself.

  And, in that instant, Wendy Darling realized that Peter Pan had not escaped to Neverland in order to keep from growing up. He had “escaped” to Neverland to become a man. Before his time, perhaps. He’d been a father to many children and a warrior against men. Peter wasn’t the boy who never grew up, but the one who grew up much too quickly. And he didn’t even know it.

  No wonder he’s so angry, Wendy thought. He had to fight against something he didn’t understand. He did his best, as a child would, caught in the role of a man.

  I have to end this, was her next thought.

  I have to end Neverland and all that it stands for. It’s brought us all nothing but pain.

  The ground beneath Wendy’s shoes bucked violently, knocking her off of her feet. She fell to her side and propped herself up as John shot forward to help her up. But before he reached her, a fissure opened up in the rock, splitting the stone between them. Wendy cried out as Michael toppled to his bottom and nearly fell into the crack, but the boy rolled away from the opening and then scrambled to his hands and knees.

  “What’s happening?” John screamed. Before anyone could answer him, a terrible roar bellowed up from within the crack, growing in volume until it drowned out the sound of the howling wind and the crashing of the waves against the rocks.

  “What the hell is that?” John asked next, yelling the question at the tops of his lungs.

  No one answered him. No one could. But Wendy had a horrible sinking feeling. She’d done something wrong. Someone once said that thinking a sin was as bad as doing it. She’d never believed such utter nonsense. People have bad thoughts all the time and never act on them. It was the not going through with them that made those people good instead of bad.

  But in this case, Wendy wasn’t so sure the same rules applied.

  For something significant had occurred on the day, six years ago, that she’d begun telling stories of Neverland. The idea for Neverland had just come to her one night, when their parents were at a banquet for her father’s bank employees and her brothers couldn’t sleep. . . .

  They’d asked her for a story. And as easy as a breeze through an open window, something had been born. Something big.

  And now it knew that she wanted to kill it. Neverland could sense it.

  This is it, she thought.

  “Once upon a time,” she began.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Wendy watched the ground warily as the crack grew wider and the rock beneath her trembled. “Once upon a time, there was a place called Neverland that existed only to serve the needs of a boy named Peter Pan. . . .”

  The roar grew in volume, until it began to vibrate Wendy’s eardrums and felt as if it would drive her mad. She watched, in abject horror, as something white and primordial pressed up through the massive fracture in the black stone. It was long and thin and weathered and as it rose higher and higher, Wendy realized what it was.

  The Never Bird.

  Long-dead and buried, the giant bird had been but a landmark in her stories – a forbidden, sacred burial place where no one was allowed to go. The spirit of the Never Bird, she had told, watched over the Natives on the mainland and guided their hunts. The Never Bird, which had once been a monster greater than any dinosaur and more fearsome than any dragon, was the guardian of Neverland. Its spirit and soul.

  It’s here to defend itself, she thought.

  “Get back, Wendy!” Peter was beside her, shoving her out of the way, his right hand brandishing his sword as if it would do any good against a monster of fossilized bone. Wendy felt a presence at her back and knew that Hook was behind her. But everyone’s gaze was on the Never Bird as it rose from its sacrosanct grave of skul
l-shaped boulders and long abandoned castle keeps.

  A wing, first. Fifteen feet of boney, bat-like fingers that were once draped in scales or feathers or leather. Wendy wondered what color it had been.

  “Once upon a time,” she started over, too rattled to remember what she’d already said. Her voice shook horribly and was barely audible over the cacophony around her. “There was a place called Neverland and it loved its little boy very much – so much that it desperately wanted to hold on to him and never let him go.” She spoke rapidly, barely discernible, but she knew she had to make it a story, complete and whole, or it wouldn’t work.

  Suddenly, Hook was reaching his left arm over her shoulder and pressing his palm to her chest. Wendy stilled as a sort of pressure vibrated the rock under her shoes. And then Hook was shoving her roughly back out of the way as the stone in front of Peter exploded outward, shattering into a spray of pebbles and salty rain as the Never Bird yanked its second wing free from its grave.

  John and Michael managed to run back far enough not to get caught by the eruption, but Peter was knocked violently backwards and soared through the air to land a good distance behind Hook and Wendy.

  Wendy wondered why he hadn’t simply caught himself with happy thoughts and his ability to fly. But then Hook was shoving at her again, this time yanking her behind him as the Never Bird’s massive wing arced down toward her with what could only have been direct intent to smash her beneath it.

  Hurry, Wendy! she told herself. Tell the bloody story before we’re all killed!

  “But Peter Pan managed to escape one day,” she said. “Through the power of a promise, because everyone knows that promises are very powerful things!”

  Hook slashed at the wing, slicing cleany through the hardened bone so that the entire tip end of it came away and crashed to the ground beside them. The impact shook their footing, as everything else did.

  The Never Bird roared from beneath the stone and, in a display of volatile wrath, the top of the immense black skull-shaped rock beneath them erupted in a colossal spray of boulders, pebbles and sand, forcing everyone above to dive for cover.

  Wendy hit the ground on her stomach and pressed her hands over her head to protect it. Then she felt Hook’s body shielding her own. Fear welled up inside of her, but not for herself. For him.

  It was a new sensation for her and it was puzzling.

  Concentrate! From beneath Hook’s strong form, Wendy continued her story. “And when he escaped,” she gasped out, inhaling sand when she took her next breath, “Peter Pan grew up. He discovered what life could be like as a man. And though some of the world made him sad, he realized that there was much in it to be admired. Friendship, wisdom, love –”

  Hook grunted from some impact and was shoved roughly off of her and Wendy turned over and looked up.

  There are a few moments in a person’s life that, no matter how much time has passed, will never, ever be forgotten. Likewise, there are some images that will forever remain imprinted on a person’s brain. Nothing will ever wipe them away or weather their clarity.

  Some are good, like the elusive wave of a whale’s tail as it slaps the surface of the water in an unexpected glance across the Pacific ocean. And some are not so good.

  This was one of the latter. For above Wendy, standing as tall as a mansion and as broad as one, too, was the petrified, yellowed skeleton of the mythical, magical Never Bird. Its bony, demonesque wings spanned the entire length of Skull Rock, its tail was winding and jagged like a dragon’s, and its beak was reminiscent of a pterodactyl’s, long and sharp and weathered by thousands of years of salt water and stone.

  The hollow eye sockets of its skull seemed to pin Wendy to the spot, trapping her there on her back beneath it.

  It was going to kill her.

  She would die there on that rock in Neverland, never to return home, never to grow up, never to write a book and get published and marry a man with cornflower blue eyes and long black hair. Never….

  It reared its immense head and then drove it downward, seemingly in slow motion.

  “Noooo!”

  “Wendy, get out of there!”

  “Wendy!”

  Everyone was screaming at her. Hook, Peter, both of her brothers – they all wanted her to move. But she was frozen in terror. She understood what it meant to be petrified in that moment. Well and truly petrified. She literally could not budge; her toes and fingers were numb, her limbs heavy as lead. She found herself wondering how much it would hurt to die by the Never Bird’s beak, even as her lips parted and her voice issued forth more words of a story she was no longer making up, but that was now telling itself.

  “Neverland became frightened that it would forever lose its boy,” she whispered. “It formed a plan to kidnap the one thing that it knew could bring Peter back to it. The girl Peter trusted. The one he had brought into his world – Wendy Darling.”

  Two streaks of black rushed past her on either side and Wendy closed her eyes to the sounds of men shouting and swords slashing and a demon-dead bird screaming in pain that it should not have been able to feel.

  “The captain of the Jolly Roger was Neverland’s tool,” she continued, quickly, stubbornly. “He captured the Wendy Bird, the Story Teller, and brought her back to Neverland, and in recognition of its creator, Neverland’s sun rose on a new day – a day of hope. For, soon, Peter Pan would follow.”

  “Wendy, get up!”

  Wendy opened her eyes to see Peter leaning over her and grabbing her arm in a fierce, fast grip. He wrenched her to her feet and pulled her behind him as the Never Bird, half of its beak now missing, turned once more to gaze at her through dead, but angry eyes.

  Wendy felt her own gaze narrow as a sudden streak of hard defiance burned through her veins, chasing away a bit of the fear that had been icing them over moments before. “But Neverland hadn’t expected the Story Teller to discover the truth about it. It hadn’t expected her to learn of her own power and what she could do with that power.”

  The Never Bird roared in fury, belting out a sound so loud and horrible that everyone below it covered their ears. The reverberation of the terrible wail felt like needles in Wendy’s eardrums and, this time, she cried out against the pain.

  But she didn’t give up. She wouldn’t give up!

  “One day, Wendy’s brother realized that his sister had the power to make things happen with her words!” She hissed through clenched teeth. Her stomach churned angrily as the roar became a high-pitched whine that seared her insides and made her want to vomit.

  But she curled her hands into fists and went on, ignoring the pain. “Neverland was using Peter and all of the other inhabitants in its world as characters in its own story! Wendy knew it had to be stopped – and now she knew how to stop it!”

  The Never Bird couldn’t let her go on. This was where Wendy had to be silenced and she knew it just as well as Neverland did. So, she braced herself as the massive, undead creature raised its giant stone-bone leg and brought it down toward Wendy.

  She watched it descend, knowing that there was no way she could move out of its path in time to keep from being squashed like a bug.

  Something hard slammed into Wendy from the side, lifting her off of her feet and carrying her swiftly out of the way as the Never Bird’s foot crashed into the rock where she’d been standing a heart beat before.

  The stone splintered beneath its weight, creating yet another fissure in the already ruptured and ruined crown of Skull Rock.

  Wendy turned in Peter’s arms and tried to catch her breath. She found herself looking up into emerald green eyes that were once more clear and clean and free of the sparking red hatred that had tainted them earlier.

  Fresh pixie dust coated his body; Tinkerbell must have given him a new dose.

  “Finish the story,” he told her, his expression earnest.

  Wendy nodded. They keep saving me.

  “Neverland was already angry, so the storm came easy,” Wendy contin
ued, knowing now exactly what she had to say. “For Neverland was as any being – born of conception, fleshed out with thought and deed, filled up with family and friends, and given purpose in existence,” she said as Peter set her down and held her gaze. He smiled the smallest of smiles, nodding once in reassurance before he turned away to fight the beast once more.

  Wendy watched as he and Hook stood side by side, a wall of man and muscle between herself and the soul of Neverland.

  “It didn’t want to die,” she said. And, as she always did when she told a story, she empathized with her characters. She felt Neverland’s fear. It was desperate and all-encompassing. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “But it had to.”

  She took a deep breath and began: “In the north part of the island, in the clearing where the Natives lived, the tribe’s camp fires flickered and went out as each member of the clan lifted its face and recalled where they had come from, in that other place, so very long ago. . . ..”

  *****

  Not far away, on the mainland of Neverland, Tiger Lily’s tribe sat with their families in their teepees, every father telling tales of spirits and of the sky and the earth and of fire. And, one by one, the family members blinked and looked up from their fires as images of different forests and different teepees flashed before their eyes.

  The Native camp began to grow dim as its fires extinguished one after another.

  Until it went dark, altogether.

  *****

  Wendy dropped and rolled as the Never Bird’s massive bony tail swished past her in an attempt to knock her out and stop her words. She rolled to a stop, got her hands beneath her, and looked up. “Beyond Crocodile Creek and the Magic Dust Falls, in the Pixie Forest, every fairy in Neverland but one paused in its flight and suddenly pondered. Where had they come from? How had they gotten there?”

  *****

  The fairy king bowed gracefully before his queen and offered her his hand. She smiled a demure smile, befitting of pixie royalty, and returned the gesture with a curtsy. She accepted his hand and the two floated on wings of glittering starlight to the center of the hollowed-out maple that had been transformed, long ago, into the dazzling, shimmering ballroom it was now. They were safe there, from the storm, as magic guarded their sanctuary from the nature beyond.